Broadcom (Irvine, Calif.), which acquired its own embedded DSP technology by buying Element 14 Ltd. (Cambridge, England), is set to include the ARM (Cambridge, England) embedded signal processing technology into a variety of SoC applications including networking and wireless, ARM said.

Optimode is a configurable VLIW-styled architecture intended for embedded signal processing applications with an associated tool chain. The tool environment enables the designer to configure and extend the type and number of data path resource units. The size and topology of local storage and the level of interconnect are also configurable. The Optimode configuration is programmed in either C or C++ and is provided with a C compiler and profiling analysis tools.

Because the resulting Optimode microarchitectures can be tuned to specific application domains, the resulting processor can be relatively small and power efficient, meeting needs for battery-powered applications, ARM said.